Fracking Foes Become Unlikely Allies

Sometimes, when you've been in a fight for a long time, you pick up allies so unlikely that your initial response is, “What the hell are they doing here?”

So it is, apparently, with the foes of fracking, who've long been lobbying state and local governments, and sometimes the feds as well, to put a stop to this practice, which has extended humankind's use of the fossil fuels that threaten the planet. Propelled by scientific data and moral urgency, these advocates have prevailed in a few regions—most notably, the state of New York—but have yet to seriously curtail this atmospherically destructive process. The Permian Basin in Texas, reportsThe Wall Street Journal, is overrun with 18-wheelers bringing in a steady stream of fracking equipment.

Indeed, too much fracking equipment, in the opinion not just of climate-change activists but a whole new posse of let's-cut-back-on-the-frack activists: Wall Street investors in fossil fuels. Turns out, according to the same Journal story that recounted the traffic jams of the 18-wheelers, that representatives of 12 investment capital firms recently met in Manhattan, concerned that the glut of oil on the world market, very much including all that fracking-produced fluid, had driven down prices to the point that it was reducing their profits. In particular, since fracking is an expensive process, the shareholders in the 30 companies that fracked the most really weren’t making the money that they believed they were entitled to.

Hence, they'd gathered to see if, by dint of exercising their leverage as major shareholders, they could persuade the frackers to drill less; to focus only on the most high-yield, low-expense shale fields; to stop flooding the market with all that damned oil. Their hope, the Journal reported, was that “if shareholders could prod most [frackers] into focusing on profitable drilling, it might also have the side benefit of achieving what the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the global oil cartel, couldn’t accomplish—getting share companies to help shrink oil supplies and boost profits.”

It's too early to know whether these investors will succeed—and they're certainly not to be mistaken for foes of fracking per se, much less for friends of the earth. However, to the scientific data and moral agency that fracking's opponents have brought to the battle, these investment companies have added a powerful new element: greed. We'll see if that will turn, or ebb, the tide.